Playing the Goldbergs With a Schubertian Touch

Bach's "Goldberg" Variations cover enormous musical ground, and when played with all the repeats, as Simone Dinnerstein did on Monday evening at Weill Recital Hall, the set has the heft and spaciousness to stand alone on a program and leave both listener and performer sated. It has everything: a graceful Aria at the start and finish, a varied and increasingly challenging set of canons, and gently but deeply involved variations alternating with virtuosic, fantasia-like ones.

Add a modern piano to the equation -- in Ms. Dinnerstein's case, a 1910 Hamburg Steinway -- and there can be a level of coloration beyond the palette Bach knew. A listener could argue that Ms. Dinnerstein's penchant for shading effects and for contrasts in articulation (from velvety in one variation to jackhammer-like in the next) and in dynamics (from whispered pianissimos to ferocious fortissimos) is anachronistic.

But that would be beside the point. This was a thoughtfully conceived, thoroughly modern performance that seemed to take into account the development of Western art music since Bach. Bach's accent and language dominated, unquestionably, but there was a hint of Prokofiev in her sharply accented reading of Variation No. 14 and her steely No. 27, a touch of Beethoven in her forceful account of No. 29 and perhaps even a trace of Tchaikovsky in the ringing, gracefully pedaled sound she created in No. 28.

The post-Bach master who came to mind most frequently, though, was Schubert. It wasn't that Ms. Dinnerstein made the music sound Schubertian, as such. But there was something in the slight pauses she took between repeated sections, or between halves of variations, and something in her pacing of the set as a whole, that so completely evoked the image of a journey that Schubert's "Winterreise" kept coming to mind. It may not be the way you want to hear the "Goldbergs" every time, but it was certainly an individual, compelling performance.

Simone Dinnerstein is performing with the cellist Zuill Bailey at the El Paso Museum of Art today and tomorrow; at the University of Texas, El Paso, on Friday; and at Queens College, in Flushing, on Dec. 6.